Eighteen months ago, I wrote a market overview report, "The Advent of Enterprise Carbon and Energy Management Systems." Returning from vacation last week, I was sifting through the recent news from suppliers in this nascent market, and thought it would be an opportune time to revisit the principal predictions I made in that report. It's actually something that we in the industry analyst world do not do often enough -- take a look back at our predictions and see how events have or have not conformed with our forecast.

So here goes:

Prediction No. 1: IT is the buyer of ECEM systems. "During the next few years [I wrote in December 2009] we believe that enterprise IT organization will emerge with the clear ownership role [for] ECEM systems. IT will bring its expertise in data analysis, data integrity, network connectivity, and overall systems architecture to bear on the corporate sustainability challenge. The faster that data sources for ECEM become more instrumented, more granular, [and] more real-time … the faster IT will move to the center of ECEM system evaluation, implementation, and operation."